Friday, August 12, 2011

Weekly Quotes Part 32

Why must I punish myself, or save myself, by pretending I’m stupid and can’t feel? (291)

If I could once see how to write a story, a novel, to get something of my feeling over, I would not despair. If writing is not an outlet, what is? (292)

I make up problems, all unnecessary. I do not reverence the present time. (293)

This is too much. The world is so big so big so big I need to feel a meaning and productiveness in my life. (297)

What I fear worst is failure, and this is stopping me from trying to write because then I don’t have to blame failure on my own writing. . . . (297-298)

I need an outsider: feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can’t understand a word he’s saying. (298)

How to overcome my naïveté in writing? Read others and think hard. Never step outside my own voice, such as I know it. (302)

Ideas flock where one plants a single seed. (307)

In the morning, all is possible; even becoming a god. (314)

War Talk

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. . . . [W]hen writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the nation, it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry. (47)

War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory. (52)

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. (68)

Fortunately power has a shelf life. When the time comes, maybe this mighty empire will, like others before it, overreach itself and implode from within. (74)

While the elite journeys to its imaginary destination somewhere near the top of the world, the dispossessed are spiraling downwards into crime and chaos. This climate of frustration and national disillusionment is the perfect breeding ground, history tells us, for fascism. (105)

We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass. (112)

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. (112)

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. (112)

Dance of Intimacy

All of us see the world through a different filter creating as many views of reality as there are people in it. (71)

[I]n any close relationship difference will inevitably emerge—differences in values, beliefs, priorities, and habits, as well as differences in how we manage anxiety and navigate relationships under stress. (71)

When we generalize about any group . . . we exaggerate similarities within the group and minimize similarities between groups. (75)

People commonly try to make changes they are not ready for to attempt to address a hot issue before they have completely addressed smaller problems. (99)

[W]e can’t learn to swim by jumping off the high dive. (99)

When we complain that our mother’s (or whoever) won’t listen to reason, it usually means that they won’t see things our way or do what we want them to do. (114)

[W]e cannot know for certain what is best for another person—what they can and cannot tolerate, what they need to do, when, and why. Surely it is difficult enough to know this for one’s self. (120)

Moving at glacial speed in the face of very high anxiety is the optimal way to proceed. Rather than signifying a lack of strength or perseverance, moving slowly—or sometimes not moving at all—may be necessary to preserving and protecting the well-being and integrity of the self. (135)

Questions enlarge our capacity for reflection and for seeing a problem in its broader context. (138)

[L]earning to say ‘I’m sorry’ goes a long way toward lowering intensity and shifting a pattern of any relationship. (140)

Mrs Dalloway

I know you thought me absurd . . . but see how extraordinarily sympathetic I am; see how I love my Rob! (66)

The Mrs. Dalloway Reader

A writer’s doubts can never, or hardly ever, be put to rest. (9)

The Waves

In a world which contains the present moment . . . why discriminate? (81)

I would rather be loved . . . than follow perfection through the sand. (88)

I see the sky, softly featured, with its sudden effulgence of moon. (106)

I am a natural collector of words, a blower of bubbles through one thing and another. And striking off these observations spontaneously I elaborate myself; differentiate myself and listening go the voice that says as I stroll past ‘Look! Take note of that!’ I conceive myself called up to provide, some winter’s night, a meaning for all my observations—a line that runs from one to another, a summing up that completes. (115)

To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. (118)

Finding Water

Quoting Maurice Setter

Too many people miss the silver lining because they’re expecting the gold. (71)

Quoting Benjamin Disraeli

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. (97)

It is the careful husbandry of optimism that allows us to move productively forward. (101)

Optimism is an elected attitude, a form of emotional courage. It is a habit that can and must be learned if we are to survive as artists. (105)

So much is out of our control, but making art is in our control. There is always a small and doable creative something we can do if we are willing to move ahead without a guarantee. We may not be able to work at our art on the level that we wish we could but we can always do something. (110)

Quoting Bertrand Russell

Drunkenness is temporary suicide. (112)

Quoting Seneca

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. (113)

[W]e do the best we can by the light we have to see by. (115)

Romancing the Ordinary

Quoting Ama Ata Aidoo

She listens to her own tales, laughs

at her own jokes, and follows her

own advice. (350)

Garland of Love

That two people have different opinions about the same thing is the measure of their uniqueness. That they are willing to listen to someone else’s position is a measure of their maturity. And that they are willing to arrive at a solution is a measure of the strength of their relationship. (August 7)